Wednesday, January 20, 2010

New Léger Poll: 17-pt Bloc Lead

Léger Marketing has a new Quebec poll out.The last Léger poll was taken at the end of November. Since then, the Bloc and the Liberals have gained three points each. At 40% the Bloc is doing well, but the 23% of the Liberals is still too low.

The Conservatives drop three points to 17%, while the NDP drops two points to 15% and the Greens one point to 4%.

Among the francophone population, the Bloc dominates with 48%. The Liberals (18%), Conservatives (15%), and NDP (14%) grapple for second place among this group. Non-francophones are slightly less monolithic, with 43% supporting the Liberals, 22% the Conservatives, and 19% the NDP. The Bloc garners 7% among this group.

It is interesting to note that the Tories are making gains among this demographic. While that could be seen as positive, it actually gives them nothing. The West Island will not be voting blue (of any hue) anytime soon.

In and around Montreal, the Bloc has the lead with 36%. Most of that is undoubtedly from the eastern part of the island and area around it. The Liberals are at 27%, the NDP at 18% (good news for Thomas Mulcair), and the Conservatives are at 12%.

That 12% for the Conservatives would seem to indicate that any hopes of making in-roads in Montérégie are illusory. The 22% non-francophone vote seems to mean that most of that RMR Montreal support is coming from the barren political wasteland of the West Island.

The Tories are doing much better in the Quebec City region, where they are tied with the Bloc at 30%. Being tied, however, is good news for the Bloc. The NDP is surprisingly doing well in this region, at 20%. The Liberals have fallen off the face of the earth here with 14%.

Finally, in the "Rest of Quebec" category (which comprises a lot of the seats in the province), the Bloc is at no risk of losing ground. They lead this category with 48%, followed by the Liberals at 20% and the Conservatives at 18%. This would seem to put the Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean seats at play.

The poll also had some Quebec provincial political results, but I'll keep those (including a provincial seat projection) for tomorrow.

Actually the NDP vote in Quebec tends to come from the BQ much more than from the Liberals. If you actually chart the popular vote in Quebec 2000, 2004, 2006 and 2008 there is an almost perfect correlation between a rise in the NDP vote and a fall in the BQ vote.

I don't think any of those ridings will have enough NDP siphoning that it will really matter. It always appears to me that the Bloc voters vote NDP when its strategically sane to do so - like Outremont, or Gatineau. In any other instance, the chances are that the Liberals and Cons are fighting for the federalist vote, and the Bloc rides to an easy victory, so why vote NDP?

Outremont is the only real example of that. Gatineau is currently a BQ seat - so I hardly see BQ supporters there voting NDP to defeat themselves.

There are a lot of very tight Liberal/BQ races in Quebec like Brossard, Ahuntsic, Papineau, Jeanne LeBer etc... where if the NDP gets 15% instead of 10% and that extra 5% all comes from the BQ - it could mean a Liberal win.

Remember that Gatineau had Boivin as the NDP candidate, but the Liberals were still seen as having an advantage, and this was especially crucial since the BQ was seen as 'going down in flames' by a lot of pundits. In all honesty, I'd bet that the NDP in Gatineau are mostly BQ voters who hedged their bets on either candidate.

However, again, if there is going to be any swing in a riding like Ahunstic or Jeanne Le Ber, it won't be BQ to NDP, it'll probably be reverse, unless the NDP are at their absolute lowest vote count possible. The separatist vote tends to rally behind whichever candidate appears to have the best advantage, and in every riding in Montreal, thats the BQ (and sometimes the Tories), and only a couple have the NDP in that position (Outremont and Westmount, though the latter is iffy).

For the BQ to win in federalist ridings like Ahuntsic and Jeanne LeBer - they can't just get the votes of "separatists" (sic...talk about dated language) they need to get a lot of votes from people who don't like the Liberals or who are "soft-nationalists" who who are just left of centre in general. Some of those people can and will vote NDP. Look at the NDP in those ridings from 2000 to 2008 - steady increases...no chance of winning just yet - but every vote the NDP takes is a vote that would otherwise go NDP. The NDP had 17% in Jeanne LeBer - I'll bet 80% of that are ex-BQ voters.

That's my point - that the ebb and flow of the NDP vote can make a difference in a certain ridings that are close between the Liberals and the BQ. But when the NDP vote goes up in Quebec it tends to come from people who used to vote BQ but now have an alternative and if it goes down - it goes back to the BQ. There is much less Liberal/NDP switching in Quebec - because the diehard 18% of francophones who would still vote for the federal Liberals are mostly women over 80 who think they are still voting for Trudeau or a few tight-assed federalists who are probably on the payroll of the Power Corp.

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